Living and Dying in Brick City

by Sampson Davis

  The half hour in the conference room zipped by in a blur. As soon as it ended, I asked a colleague to point the way to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit and ran down the hall in search of the room number that had been listed next to Snake’s real name on the board. I rounded the corner and noticed a small group of people gathered in the hall outside the room. Some were crying. A few of the faces looked vaguely familiar. When one of the women glanced up at me, my heart stopped. The lump in my throat felt like a boulder. It was Snake’s sister. I could see in her red, puffy eyes that she recognized me, too. What was she thinking? Did she resent me because I hadn’t gotten jail time like her brother had? Guilt washed over me, and I felt a sudden urge to explain. I wanted to tell her that I’d needed to let her brother go to find my own way. The family members’ eyes followed me. I could hear their voices inside my head: Wasn’t he the one who used to hang out with Snake? Who does he think he is, coming here now? He thinks he’s so special. I wanted to pull up a chair, grieve with them, and assure them that it was me, the same old Marshall. I wanted to show them that I hadn’t abandoned Snake, that I hadn’t abandoned them, that if I hadn’t made new friends, if I hadn’t gone to college, I would have ended up here, too, right beside Snake. As I ambled up to Snake’s sister, I realized that I never even knew her name. I fumbled for the right words.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Snake’s sister nodded kindly. He had died the night before, she confirmed. I wondered for a moment whether I should hug her, but it felt too awkward. I asked her to pass along my condolences to the rest of the family, and I excused myself. I slipped past the crowd and into the room where Snake had been. It was empty and a bit eerie. The covers on Bed 6, where he once lay, were still pulled back, and a host of medical machines—ventilator, cardiac monitor, IV pump—sat motionless. Snake’s body had been taken to the morgue, but I still stood there in silence, looking around the room, thinking, This so easily could have been me.

  The swell of emotions was confusing: pain, regret, gratitude, guilt. I remembered Snake’s cool laugh, his witty remarks, his collection of baseball caps. I wondered if beneath all that bravado and rage he’d had dreams, like me, but had been too afraid to share them, or whether life had choked every bit of hope from him from the start. I wondered if I could have said something that might have made a difference. I wondered about all the things I never even knew or thought to ask him—what his mother was like, whether his father was part of his life, whether he’d ever had a teacher or counselor who’d told him he was smart. Kids aren’t born without hope. But it’s easy to grow up where we grew up, seeing death and destruction around us all the time, and think it’s normal. And it’s also difficult to hope for a life you’ve never seen beyond the television screen, to believe it is truly within your grasp.

  Like a survivor pulled from the wreckage over a pile of dead bodies, I stood in that hospital room wondering: Why? Why me? Why had I survived? Why had I made it out? The guilt felt so overwhelming that I couldn’t think clearly.

  The brothers kept coming. Night after night. Week after week. Young men, wasting their skills and smarts on the streets, young brothers who reminded me of the person I used to be. Then came one whose physical appearance made me do a double take.

  It was an uncharacteristically hot day in April 2001 when I heard a commotion in the ambulance entrance outside the hospital.

  “We need a stretcher over here!” a security guard yelled.

  He was the first to notice the guy who had somehow lifted himself from a nearby sidewalk and stumbled around the corner to the glass doors of the ambulance bay. He was pounding on the door with the little energy he had left. His bloody hand streaked the clear glass a dark red.

  “We need help now!” the guard persisted.

  I grabbed the first free stretcher I saw and dashed with other hospital workers toward the noise. Outside, the patient I would come to know as Legend lay slumped against the door. His tattered flesh oozed blood from quarter-sized holes all over his body. We lifted him onto the gurney and ran at top speed toward the resuscitation bay. I was glad I’d worn my Nike sneakers with my scrubs that day. Comfort was important, and so was the ability to move fast.

  “Doc, I’m going to die,” Legend uttered, spitting up blood. He was determined to get the words out: “Please tell my family, my kids, I love them.”

  I looked down to reassure him and was startled by what I saw: His face resembled mine. Legend appeared to be in his late twenties, like me, with the same muscular medium build, the same honey-colored complexion, and the same neat, short haircut. He seemed dazed, and his eyes followed my every move. He reached up for my hand and attempted to speak. Instead, more blood spurted out.

  “Hang in there, man,” I said. “You are not going to die.”

  But who was I fooling? The more clothes we cut off, the more bullet holes I counted. Legend had taken two gun blasts to the abdomen, another two to the chest, and there were two superficial wounds. The high-caliber bullets had torn through his vital organs. The floor in the trauma bay was now slippery with his blood, and I struggled to keep my footing as I maneuvered quickly around the bed and hooked him to a heart monitor. His blood pressure was low and his heart rate high. Another member of the team inserted an IV to deliver a saline solution and blood. He was struggling for air, so I hurriedly inserted a breathing tube in his mouth to connect him to a ventilator. With obvious bullet wounds in the chest and trouble breathing, he most likely had a collapsed lung. I needed to insert a chest tube, and quickly. I’d done it only twice before, but I knew better than to hesitate. My years of street sports always helped me through tricky times like these. Back then I’d had the confidence I needed to go for the winning shot in pickup basketball. I talked myself into that same zone now as I grabbed a scalpel and made a two-inch incision on the side of his chest: You’ve got this. You can do it. Stay calm and steady.

  Next, I probed the cavity with a blunt instrument, trying to make my way to the lung. It took only a few seconds to puncture the connective tissue and reach it. A whoosh of air and then a rush of blood spurted out of the hole. The lung had collapsed and looked like a crumpled wad of paper. As the built-up pressure inside the chest cavity escaped, the shriveled lung began to re-expand. I placed the chest tube, which looked like a small garden hose, into the chest cavity and hooked it to the vacuum. The reinflated lung adhered to the inner chest wall, as it should have, giving Legend more time. But blood was pouring into the tube quicker than the vacuum could suction it out.

  In a last-ditch effort to save his life, we cracked open his chest to see if we could close a hole in or near the heart by clamping off damaged blood vessels, but when we reached the heart, we discovered that there was no more blood. All four chambers were empty. There was nothing more we could do. Damn! I snapped off my bloody plastic gloves, took a moment to steady myself, and headed for the waiting room. The look on my face must have spoken before I said even a word. Legend’s mother screamed for God and fell to her knees. A clump of hospital workers gathered around to comfort her. That’s when I realized she was a hospital employee herself, part of the Beth Israel family. This kind of news, never easy to deliver, was even tougher now. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We did everything we could.” Legend’s mother was inconsolable. A crowd of about fifty people kept vigil outside the hospital. They stood around the ambulance bay in tight clusters, retelling the story of the gun battle that had taken Legend’s life. I quickly gathered that Legend had been a prominent drug figure on nearby Chancellor Avenue. I knew the turf well. Homicide detectives who came to investigate were familiar with Legend and they filled me in on his long drug-dealing history. I’m not often surprised, but this news shocked me. Nothing about his wholesome appearance had said drug dealer—no flashy jewelry, no gun, no rolls of money were found when we cut off his clothes. And Legend’s dying words were a profession of love for his wife and children. For days, his death was the talk of the hospital. Several of the orderlies
, EKG technicians, and nurses knew him or his mother well, and they helped me piece together the legend surrounding Legend.

  Like so many black boys growing up in Newark, Legend dreamed of making it out, and he knew his ticket would be sports. He was one of those dudes who could do just about all things sports, but he was particularly good at basketball and football. His talents had earned him all-city honors in both sports a couple of times. He received a scholarship to play Division III football at a well-respected university, but to everyone’s surprise, he lasted just one semester before returning to the old neighborhood. There he built the drug-dealing empire that ultimately would consume his life. He had ruled the neighborhood without challenge until his mysterious disappearance about a year earlier, when he was a suspect in a high-stakes murder that had occurred in Newark a week before his sudden departure. Police didn’t have enough evidence to make a case against Legend and his crew. The no-snitch policy is real in the hood, and often a matter of life and death. You grow up hearing “snitches get stitches,” you see evidence of it all the time, and you keep your mouth shut. It’s not ideal and not the least bit courageous, but for folks who’d learned the hard way that those hired “to protect and serve” were no match for the thugs on the streets, it’s just a matter of survival. The case went unsolved.

  “Out of sight, out of mind” is how a relative of Legend’s, who was also one of his lieutenants, explained the reason Legend left town. While Legend passed the time at a family member’s house in the deep South, there was a rush to claim his highly profitable drug arena, prompting a chain of shootings and stabbings. As I listened to this account of the drug war, I pinpointed the time period instantly. It had been the previous fall, when gunshot victims began showing up in the emergency room every day—so often that we’d felt it necessary to heighten our security.

  Legend returned to Newark in early spring 2001 to reclaim his turf. He’d been warned that a new generation, “the young’uns,” had taken over, and that they’d earned their ruthless reputation. In their minds, his reign was a thing of the past. Legend was unfazed by his young rivals. He figured he could battle them and chop down the former friends who’d become swollen with power in his absence. But the old gangster wasn’t coming back to the same streets he’d left. His generation had grown up with a street code that allowed them to return from jail or trips away and reclaim their old spots without much trouble. Others who’d filled the space understood that it was just temporary, and out of respect backed away.

  Not so with the young’uns. It was every man for himself. They weren’t giving up anything without a battle. They were quick to pull the trigger, and they terrorized Chancellor Avenue with their shooting sprees, killing folks for sport. So they resisted when Legend began to occupy one of the corners with his cadre of runners, lieutenants, deliverers, and lookouts. At first, his return seemed uneventful. He’d gone to school with many of his workers and customers, and he’d spent time in practically every apartment in the neighborhood. Even the police didn’t pose much of a threat; Legend knew the officers and their patrol patterns. Some of his young rivals also showed him deference; they’d been groomed by him, after all. They’d grown up running errands for him, back in the day, fetching snacks from the store or chicken dinners from the neighborhood restaurant. In return, they got a few dollars, snacks, chicken dinners for themselves, and, most of all, bragging rights at school the next day.

  Before long, Legend had carved out a small niche for himself in his old drug empire and figured the young’uns had just backed away. But on the hot, breezeless day when I met him, the young’uns showed him he’d figured wrong. As the streets tell it, two people on a black motorcycle came rolling down the block where Legend stood talking to his runners. Faceless in black helmets, they pulled up to the corner and opened fire, striking Legend all over his body. The shooter on the back of the bike then hopped off, walked up to Legend, and taunted: “Where’s your lookouts? Know who you got working for you.” He then hopped back on the bike and they sped off, leaving a trail of blood on the ground and the smell of burnt rubber in the air.

  God only knows how he managed to pull himself up from the sidewalk that should have been his deathbed and stumble to the hospital. For weeks after our lives collided in the E.R., I felt haunted by his confused gaze. His pleading eyes seemed to ask: How come my cards got played this way?

  It wasn’t unusual that I stayed up nights wondering what I could have done differently. Every time I lost a patient, I lost sleep, scrutinizing the lifesaving steps my team had taken, asking myself whether I could have done something better. But Legend’s death tore me up like no other. When I saw him in my dreams, it was as though I was looking at myself. I’d wake up sweating … and realize that somehow I’d tricked the gods. I’d managed to escape it all—the drugs, the dangerous pursuit of street fame and wealth, early death.

  I thought back to a trip I’d taken to the Bronx when I was seventeen, just before the robbery and my time in juvenile detention. My friend Duke—the same Duke who’d masterminded the robbery—had convinced me I could do better than what I was earning working two part-time jobs—one at McDonald’s and another at IKEA. Even with both, I never seemed to have enough money to buy the things I needed; of course, I didn’t understand then how warped a seventeen-year-old’s definition of “need” could be. I’d managed to buy a used Audi 5000, which got me to and from work, but it needed repairs. I didn’t have the money, and in the irrational mind of a teenager, fixing my car was a need worth whatever risks I had to take to fulfill it. Duke’s nonsense was starting to make sense. We could pool our money and take over the Dayton Street drug trade in no time, he said. If we didn’t, someone else would. And so, a short time later, there I was, being patted down inside an Uptown apartment by dudes with Uzis strapped across their chests. Stacks of money and bags of cocaine covered a coffee table. The scene looked like one from a gangster movie, but it was real. So, too, were the risks I hadn’t considered before doing this, and the possible consequences. I wanted to turn and walk away, but given the Uzi-toting brothers at the door, I didn’t think that would be wise. Duke and I bought the drugs and made a quick exit. A light rain was falling outside, but the droplets felt like slaps across my face. I thought: What the hell am I doing here?

  The drive back to Newark was nerve-racking. Every time a police car got near us, my heart rate spiked, and I had to remind myself not to speed or draw attention to myself. How do dudes live like this? I wondered. It definitely wasn’t what I wanted for my life. When we reached home, I told Duke he could have it all. I had no interest in taking over Dayton Street or anywhere else. Drug dealing just wasn’t my thing. It would take the robbery and the trip to juvenile detention for me to make a clean break with the thug life, though. Duke, unfortunately, stayed out there, and landed in and out of jail as I struggled through college and medical school.

  By the end of my second year of residency at Beth, I was weary of all the bloodshed, weary of pronouncing one young black man after another dead of gunshot wounds, weary of losing to the streets. So when one day in 2001 I encountered yet another young gunshot victim, I’d had enough. He was unconscious, breathing through a tube that had been inserted by emergency medical technicians on the way to the hospital. I cut off his bloody clothes and was peeling away the remnants of his shirt when I noticed a twelve-inch scar. The sight stunned me. It was unmistakably a laparotomy scar, snaking from the pit of his chest to just below his belly button. He had been cut open before. The surgeon standing next to me, Dr. Baker, noticed the scar, too.

  “Holy cow!” he exclaimed, moving in to examine it closer. “That’s my work.”

  Baker seemed as certain as if he’d just discovered a long-lost Picasso.

  “You took care of this guy before?” I asked, feeling an odd emotion rising inside me.

  “Yep, last summer—that’s my scar,” my colleague replied.

  Suddenly, I was ashamed. Most times, I felt empathy for the young
brothers, hanging on to life by the thinnest hair after a score had been settled on the streets. I never excused their reckless behavior, but I understood it. Not this time, though. This dude had been shot the previous summer and had experienced a lifesaving operation. Now he was back, in the same position. Dr. Baker, who is white, didn’t say another word, but in his silence I heard the judgment of white people (and “bourgie” black folks) everywhere:

  “What’s wrong with those people?”

  Many times I’d found myself explaining to white folks that poverty and crime are not a factor of skin color and that there is nothing about being black or brown that makes a person inherently violent. I’d argued that desperation and hopelessness often make poor people careless about their actions and the consequences. Change the conditions, I’d said, and their lives would change. But as I stood there patching up that guy, my patience and understanding were gone. I wanted to shake him, knock some sense into him, make him really hear me.

  What will it take for you to get it, man? I thought. We don’t have to live like this.

  Often in the early years of my residency I wondered: What had made the difference between me and the many friends I’d lost to drugs and gang violence? I’d known the same craving that Snake, Duke, and even the repeat offender must have felt for material wealth and respect. I’d known the kind of poverty that often makes a man in that situation feel justified in his wrongdoing—a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, take care of himself and take the load off Moms, by any means necessary. And I’d known the impatience many young brothers feel in a wealth-driven society that they believe is designed for them to fail. In their minds, it’s useless to even try playing by the rules. And so they create their own definition of how to win and earn respect.